Journeys of a quilter in art, dyeing, and handquilting.

Two Pieces of the Puzzle

My designs for my puzzle pieces began as sketches as part of an online quilting class I took called Inspired to Design with Elizabeth Barton. One of the main lessons I learned in the class is to make your pattern sketches without judgement, and make a lot of them! In various exercises, Elizabeth would encourage us to draw at least a dozen, if not more, sketches that we would then choose from a final design.

On the left, you can see a black and white print out of one of my designs from the class. That particular lesson was playing with positive and negative space, cutting out shapes from paper and re-arranging them to make patterns. I liked the pattern I made but felt it needed a bit more transforming to be a part of this group quilt. So taking Elizabeth’s technique to heart, I drew MANY more sketches from the original inspiration. In this process of making many sketches I started to be drawn to squiggly lines and floating circles.

Putting my block together, I started with the floating circles. One of the fabrics we had in our fabric pull to use for our puzzle pieces was this fantastic green and blue circle design! I cut out individual circles and arranged them in a random cascading pattern.

Next were my squiggly lines. I chose two of the bright blue fabrics in our fabric set, and randomly cut wavy squiggly curvy lines. Between each set of stacked circles I layered around two to three squiggly lines.

The design was quite lovely at this point, but I hadn’t yet used any of our maroon or red fabrics in the design. I thought a little bit of a color pop would be important to tie the block in with the other blocks, so I cut a few circles out of the bright fabric and layered them behind the cascading circles.

For my second color piece, I deviated wildly from my original paper cut-out sketch (seen far left). I think this is a great example of how continually making sketch after sketch without judgement lets you discover new ideas you didn’t realize you had. As I sketched, I was drawn to the idea of interlocking circles that create depth and motion.

This block was a bit more difficult to pull off. Well, I made it easy one way because I was free-hand cutting the circles, and didn’t mind a bit of wonkiness. Rather, the difficulty was because I ran out of fusible webbing, and it being a Sunday I had no quilt shop open to purchase more. This was my day to complete it though, so I forged ahead, knowing I could glue down the design instead of fuse. However, this made all the pieces very loose and wobbly as I tried to place them, and made it take twice as long to glue each little piece!

It had been ages since I free-motion quilted, and I felt a bit rusty at first to start. However, those pesky deadlines were looming again, so I forged ahead to complete it. The stitching and design isn’t as fine or detailed as I imagined in my head, but I got it done. We have a saying at work right now, “do and be done.” I have been swamped with projects and deadlines, and often times find myself only able to complete something as well as I can in that moment, instead of having the time to finesse, re-do and make perfect. I think it is good to have time to make something as good as you can, but I think it can also be good to complete something in the time you have available and move on, for it is better to be completed than not done at all. So in that spirit, I completed my puzzle pieces, and they are good enough, and will join our Puzzlement quilt for everyone to enjoy.

Click here to see my post on our group process of making Puzzlement and you can see the quilt in person at our bi-annual guild show, May 28-29 at the Methodist Church in Bishop from 10am – 5pm on Saturday and 10am – 4pm on Sunday.

Thank you Serena, you show so clearly and highlight the importance of not going into a project with fixed ideas and allowing our minds space to be creative and wander. I gave up work on Friday after 9 years in one job, in order to concentrate on my textile art. I am very rusty though! So your posts really inspire me.